Word: somali
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...Maalim is still shocked that she's alive. Maalim remembers very little of how she washed up on Yemen's shores last month, but she does remember swimming for 30 minutes, exhausted and confused, through the shark-infested waters of the Arabian Sea after being dumped overboard by her Somali smugglers. Eight months pregnant at the time, alone and desperate for something better, Maalim says she risked her life to reach Yemen several months after her husband fled Somalia using the same route. Now squatting in the home of a Somali community leader in Bassatine - an African slum outside Yemen...
Maalim's case is hardly unique. Throughout recent history, Somalis have sought refuge in Yemen, a remote, impoverished country at the tip of the Arabian peninsula, less than 200 miles across a narrow sea. But despite Yemen's own dire situation, it continues to be flooded with Somali refugees seeking the safety, stability and economic opportunities that have long since vanished from their own failed state in the Horn of Africa. In fact, the number of African refugees in Yemen is steadily rising. According to the U.N.'s refugee agency UNHCR, 72,753 African refugees - mostly from Somalia - reached Yemen...
...beatings and drowned loved ones are part of every refugee's narrative in Kharaz Camp, run by the U.N. in the desert about 100 miles west of Aden, and in the urban slum of Bassatine. "They leave Somalia because of war and money troubles," says Abdel Kadir Hassan, a Somali community leader in Bassatine, who left Mogidishu in 1995 with 16 members of his family. "There is a government here in Yemen; in Somalia there is no government. We can have our farms and get what we need in our country, but there is no government...
Many others have, in the past, tried to journey on to the more lucrative promise of menial labor in neighboring Saudi Arabia. But an intensifying war on Yemen's Saudi border in recent months has made that option increasingly difficult. "Somalis used to smuggle themselves into Saudi Arabia," says Zakaria Omar, a Somali counselor for the international aid agency Doctors Without Borders. "But now there are a lot of armies on the border. People are searching for a better life here. When they arrive, they find the opposite of what they heard. But they have no choice - they have...
...absurd idea, according to Jilani Ali Maalim, head of the Somali community in Bassatine. "Most of the people who leave Somalia are minorities," says Maalim, who has put up more than 20 non-relatives in his house, all of them people who had nowhere else to go. "They belong to weak tribes, and most of them are not well-educated. For that reason, they sometimes wind up in the conflict zones, because they don't know better...